The Evidences of the Genuineness of the Gospels (Volume 3) (Paperback)

Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER VII. ON THE PECULIAR SPECULATIONS OF THE THEOSOPHIC GNOSTICS. Section I. Introductory Remarks on the Character of Ancient Philosophy. I Feel a reluctance to proceed at once to an account of the more imaginative part of the speculations of the Gnostics without some words of preparation. It would be doing them injustice to give a naked statement of their belief, if we may call it by so grave a name, without any explanation of the general character of the philosophy of that period in which it had its origin. A stranger from a foreign land, of which the manners and customs are altogether different from those of the country he is visiting, if brought among individuals unprepared for the peculiarities of his dress and behaviour, would not be more unfairly estimated, nor exposed to more unfounded ridicule, than a speculatist of ancient times, whose opinions Vol. in. 9 should at once be confronted with the conceptions of the present day. It should be understood, also, that a modern language is often but an imperfect instrument for expressing the opinions of an ancient theorist. What is true of poetry is true also of the speculations of the ancients. The plausibility of the latter, like the beauty of the former, not unfrequently depends on a nice adaptation of words, callida verborum junctura, which can hardly be imitated in translation, and, disappears in an abstract. It is often the case, that modern terms do not sufficiently correspond with those of an ancient language, to admit of their being fitted together in the same manner. Having, then, formerly remarked the disadvantage to which the Gnostics are exposed from the circumstance, that our accounts of them are derived principally from their opponents, we will now attend to the other obstacles which lie in the...